In today's society, end users regularly utilize smartphones, tablets, laptops, computing devices, and other technologies to access media content, access internet websites, access various types of network services, access financial services, access gaming content, perform work, and perform a variety of other tasks and functions. As the number of end users has steadily increased over the years, a substantial number of end users have become increasingly reliant on various network services and programs to perform daily routines and various tasks that would otherwise have been done without such services and programs. As a result, network interruptions or downtime often causes substantial productivity losses, financial losses, and inefficiencies. A significant cause of such network interruptions or downtime are denial-of-service attacks and other types of computer-related attacks. Denial-of-service attacks often consist of malicious high-volume machine-generated service requests that cause server overloads or other bottlenecks in a communications network. Such attacks typically result in the inability to service legitimate requests coming from various end users because servers become overloaded with attack traffic.
Denial-of-service attacks have been steadily growing in volume, and many attacks now include attack traffic being sent at hundreds of gigabytes per second. Additionally, denial-of-service attacks are typically distributed geographically and the true source of the attack is often spoofed, which makes it difficult to block attack traffic at the source of the attack. While various source address verification techniques have been utilized to assist in determining the source of an attack, such techniques have failed to be implemented across internet service providers so as to ensure that the blocking of traffic at the source is effective. Currently, there are two primary approaches for dealing with denial-of-service attacks. The first approach is to apply filters, such as scrubbers, to incoming traffic in order to block malicious requests. Filters, however, are often expensive, take a significant amount of time to activate, and often become a single point of failure. Additionally, filters may also allow for the undesired outcome of blocking legitimate traffic in addition to blocking attack traffic. The second approach is to overprovision server and network resources so as to enable the servers and network resources to absorb high-volume attacks. Notably, however, such overprovisioning is often extremely costly and is also impractical in network areas outside of very critical network infrastructure services.